Surgeon General: ‘We All Pay the Price’ for Opioid Epidemic

The Lowell SunDecember 7, 2018

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams addresses an audience in Boston as Arlington Police Chief Frederick Ryan looks on Thursday during a national summit focused on police efforts to address the opioid epidemic. AP Photo/Steven Senne Sun staff photos can be ordered by visiting our SmugMug site.

By Katie Lannan

State House News Service

BOSTON -- In the roughly 20 minutes U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams spent addressing law enforcement and health care leaders in Boston Thursday morning, two Americans would die of opioid overdoses, he told the crowd gathered in a Harvard Medical School conference room.

“The truth is, whenever anyone, anywhere, is suffering from substance use disorder from the opioid epidemic, it’s not just their problem,” Adams said at the Police Assisted Recovery Initiative National Law Enforcement Summit. “We all pay the price.”

Adams, who was appointed last year by President Donald Trump to the post that’s often described as the nation’s doctor, told the conference’s roughly 400 attendees that his three focal points in fighting the opioid addiction are prevention, education and the use of the drug naloxone, all areas touched on in recent Massachusetts laws.

For Adams, an anesthesiologist who in his last post as Indiana’s state health commissioner led efforts to respond to an HIV outbreak there among injection drug users, the education piece revolves around both highlighting the severity of the epidemic and breaking down stigma.

He urged the crowd to join him in efforts to reduce the stigma of addiction, both by asking people “how we can meet their needs” and sharing personal stories.

Adams said his brother is in prison “due to crimes he committed to support his addiction” and has never been offered medication-assisted addiction treatment.

“We grew up in a rural area. My brother had to have someone drive him to get his drugs when he was at home,” Adams said. “In prison, he said, they’ll deliver it right to your jail cell. It’s easier to get drugs in prison than what it is at home. That’s why it’s critical that we make treatment available for folks across the spectrum, wherever they are in the system.”

John Rosenthal, who co-chairs PAARI with Arlington Police Chief Fred Ryan, said addiction is a chronic disease without a cure, “but can be treated with love and compassion, with medication and community support.”

“At the end of the day with the opioid epidemic, there’s only two choices,” he said. “Long-term treatment, or death.”

Rosenthal said overdoses killed 72,000 people last year across the country, and for every death, there are roughly nine saves with the overdose reversal drug Narcan.

In Massachusetts, where 1,518 people died of opioid overdoses in the first nine months of this year, the Department of Public Health this year issued a statewide standing order allowing pharmacies to dispense Narcan, known generically as naloxone, without a prescription.

Adams said making naloxone available to community members as well as first responders is critical because more than half of overdoses occur inside the home.

“Until we can invent an ambulance or a police car that can get across town in four minutes...we’re not going to dig ourselves out of this hole relying solely on first responders,” Adams said.

The standing order for naloxone was part of a law Gov. Charlie Baker signed in August. Also because of that law, Baker said Thursday, prisons and jails in Massachusetts “for the first time are going to be in the business of providing, on what I would call a focused and strategic basis, medication-assisted treatment.”

Baker said there is still work to be done around addiction, especially with the rise of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl.

“I have had people say to me, now that you’re done with this, what else are you going to do? My answer is, I’m going to stay on this,” Baker said. “I’m going to stay on it. The next governor, whoever that is, is going to have to stay on it, the governor after that is going to have to stay on it.”